Amazon, JPMorgan, Berkshire team up for a new healthcare company

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase have announced a partnership to create an independent healthcare company for their employees in the United States.

Challenging the deteriorating state of the nation’s health care system, the goal of the new company would solely be to provide for the care and well-being of the workforce of the three companies, and it will be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints.”

The new venture will initially focus on technology for “simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare” for their more than 500,000 US employees, the companies said. They did not elaborate on their strategy, but said they are searching for a chief executive officer.

“The ballooning costs of healthcare act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” said Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett. “Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable.”

Jeff Bezos, concurring with Buffett said that though the three partners are “open-eyed about the degree of difficulty” of entering the healthcare system as a services provider, the ultimate goal of “reducing healthcare’s burden on the economy while improving outcomes for employees and their families would be worth the effort.”

For rest of the details, the press release announcing the new venture said, “The effort announced today is in its early planning stages, with the initial formation of the company jointly spearheaded by Todd Combs, an investment officer of Berkshire Hathaway; Marvelle Sullivan Berchtold, a Managing Director of JPMorgan Chase; and Beth Galetti, a Senior Vice President at Amazon.”